Batman 6 - The Dark Knight (11 page)

“There’s nothing worse than a dirty cop,” he told her. “My job—prosecuting them—doesn’t win me any popularity contests, but it’s necessary, and I love it.”

“Love it?” Rachel asked, raising her brows.

“Funny way to put it, huh? But yeah, ‘love’ is the word. Guess that makes me pretty weird.”

They sat and sipped in silence, watching pedestrians scurry past the window. After Dent’s declaration, there seemed to be nothing more to say, but Rachel didn’t want the conversation to end. That was when Rachel told Dent she was impressed with his looks after all.

B
ruce Wayne saw them together in Gotham Park, in one of the horse-drawn buggies tourists liked to rent. They were sitting close together, deep in conversation, oblivious to the coachman sitting just in front of them, or the families out for a day’s recreation, or the tourists snapping pictures, or Bruce Wayne, in his Lamborghini with a tall, sunglassed blonde in the next seat.

A few hours later, Bruce became Batman, and Batman delivered a pair of holdup men to police headquarters and arrived back at the penthouse early—just a bit after one.

Alfred, wearing pajamas and a robe, greeted him, and asked, “No need for needlework tonight?”

“No, not a single drop of blood shed—mine or theirs. Alfred, what do you think of Harvey Dent?”

“Where did
that
come from, Master Bruce?”

“You know who I’m talking about?”

“The new fellow in the District Attorney’s Office?”

“That’s him.”

“I can’t say I have an opinion. As the great Will Rogers said, ‘All I know is what I read in the papers.’ What is
your
opinion of Mr. Dent, Master Bruce?”

“He’s too good to be true. His bio reads like . . . I don’t know—like something a press office made up.”

“That worries you?”

“Yes, it does. He’s in a position where he could do a lot of harm.”

“Miss Dawes works with him, doesn’t she? Perhaps she could offer insight.”

“I don’t want to bother Rachel with it. She’s got enough on her mind. I’ll look into it myself.”

Bruce Wayne had acquired a lot of skills, including superior detective skills. Some he’d gotten during the years he had bounced from university to university, preparing himself for a mission he had not yet defined for himself, some from his years with Rā’s al Ghūl. “It’s always useful to know as much as possible about your enemy,” Rā’s had once told him. Now, Bruce put everything he had learned to the task of getting to know Harvey Dent. What he got from hacking into computers was next to useless, but not quite: he didn’t care about Dent’s university grades, or the apartments he’d rented, but Bruce was glad to see the financial stuff—glad, but disappointed. Dent’s bank accounts and credit-card activity were impeccable. He had neither spent nor received a single dollar that couldn’t be accounted for. His police record was not quite as impeccable, he’d actually had a speeding ticket and three parking violations, none of which he’d questioned, all of which he’d settled promptly.

“Nobody
is this virtuous,” Bruce told Alfred.

“Perhaps you might consider speaking for yourself, Master Bruce.”

“Point taken.
You
are a saint.”

“I wouldn’t say that. But you can.”

Next, Bruce investigated the deaths of Dent’s parents. At first, he had great difficulty concentrating on this task, and he didn’t know why. Finally, he realized that Dent’s tragedy paralleled his own: the loss of both mother and father, simultaneously, to violence. There were differences, of course. Bruce had been a child when he watched a man with a gun shoot Thomas and Martha Wayne, scattering Martha’s pearls into the gutter, and vanish into the night. Dent had been well into his teens . . .

Perhaps old enough to have committed the crimes himself? It was an avenue worth pursuing. But that was not easily done. Any case more than ten years old was more than cold, it was frigid, hard to solve with every advantage even a modern police system can offer. And Gotham’s was
not
a modern police system. There had been recent improvements, largely financed by the Wayne Foundation and implemented by James Gordon, but only information from the last year was reliably in the brand-new computer’s database. Before that . . . Bruce knew of a ramshackle warehouse in South Gotham full of cardboard boxes, tens of thousands of them, stuffed with documents and even physical evidence relating to crimes committed as long as a half century earlier. Should Bruce Wayne request a guided tour? But why would fun-loving Bruce be interested in such serious antiques? That would be completely out of character for him and might start people wondering. Bruce remembered the lessons of his criminal mentor. He’d spent several years being taught by Ducard without ever once suspecting that Ducard was, in fact, Rā’s al Ghūl. Lesson: If you’re going to wear a mask, be sure it fits well.

Okay, Bruce was out. That left Batman.

It was ridiculously easy to break into the storage facility. It was on an old street paved with crumbling brick and virtually unlit. There was only one car, a twenty-year-old Chevrolet, parked near the building and that, Batman guessed, was the watchman’s ride. One watchman? Not necessarily. He could have given a ride to colleagues. Maybe other watchmen came by public transportation? Not likely. There were no buses that ran in this neighborhood after six, and taxi fare would be too costly.

Okay, one for sure, and maybe more.

Batman went around to the rear of the facility, found a broken window and . . . why not? Why do this the hard way? Batman entered through the window and began to prowl. He heard the tinny sound of a cheap television set coming from somewhere near the front of the first floor—no doubt the watchman, doing whatever he had to do to get through eight hours of tedium.

After an hour, Batman gave up. There was no system, no order here, just a vast jumble of boxes containing, probably, millions of items. There was also a lot of water damage—the sky was visible through holes in the roof—and a lot of rodent activity.

Batman exited through the broken window, slid through the shadows as he’d been taught to do until he reached the Tumbler, parked a mile away in the shadows. He considered his next move as he knew he would find nothing useful about Harvey Dent in the public records. Was anyone involved in the death of Dent’s parents still alive and able to be questioned? Maybe Gordon could help.

He could, and did. Bruce had called him at home the next day, using the rough growl that was Batman’s voice, and asked about the old case. Gordon knew of a detective who had worked on the case, retired just a few years, living in a fishing shack in New York’s Adirondack Mountains. A man by the name of Al Grooms. The question was, how to approach Al Grooms? As Bruce Wayne? No—again, questioning Grooms is not something rich kid Bruce would do. Batman, then? He didn’t want to scare—or challenge—Grooms, so maybe Batman wasn’t such a good idea, either. Okay, a third choice.

Bruce reached Grooms by telephone and made a date to meet him the following Saturday. So, early Friday morning, Bruce donned a red wig, added a red moustache, adopted an aggressive strut very different from the walk of either Wayne or Batman, and drove the Lamborghini to New York. He spent a night at a motel and met Al Grooms at a coffee shop the next morning.

Grooms was a burly man, gone a bit round, dressed in jeans and a plaid shirt. In his day, he must have been tough and frightening. Bruce introduced himself as Charles Malone, a freelance journalist doing an article on Harvey Dent. At first, Grooms seemed reluctant to talk. Then, suddenly, it was as though a dam burst and the words poured out of him. Yeah, he remembered the Dent case. They wanted to pin it on the kid, him and the other officers working the case, but the kid, Harvey, really
was
at that damn drugstore all night, and they couldn’t get enough to hold him, even in those days, when justice in Gotham was pretty much touch-and-go, or maybe lucky’d be a better word. Now, Harvey’s old man was a perfect son of a bitch, worst cop on the force, and there was no shortage of skels’d like to put him down, and maybe a couple of decent citizens, too, but the truth was, he done the old lady, then he done himself, and good riddance to the both of them.

None of which answered the question of why they had gotten together.

Bruce thanked Al Grooms, paid for his lunch, gave the counterman an extra twenty to pay for Al’s dinner, then drove south. By evening, he was having tea with Alfred.

He told Alfred about the meeting of Charles Malone and Al Grooms.

“Have you decided that Mr. Dent is the paragon he seems to be?” Alfred asked.

“No. There has to be
something
wrong with him.”

“Perhaps what’s wrong with him is that he seems to have captured the affections of Miss Dawes.”

“I won’t dignify that with a reply. Anything happen here while I was away?”

Bruce exhausted every possibility in investigating Harvey Dent: interviews—usually as Charles Malone—with teachers, classmates, old girlfriends, recent girlfriends, fellow prosecutors, defense lawyers, even convicts. He checked Dent’s school transcripts as far back as junior high. He checked bar association documents. Nothing. Harvey Dent wasn’t a saint, but he was a person of enormous integrity, courage, and ability.

Then he concentrated on Dent himself. For weeks, although he didn’t know it, Harvey Dent had an unseen guardian angel. Batman followed him to and from his office, as well as the various courtrooms Dent frequented. Bruce Wayne, pretending to be interested in a female defendant, watched Dent conduct a major trial, and disguised as Charles Malone, watched Dent conduct several minor trials. All successfully, all with the utmost reticence. Finally, on a rainy Friday evening, Bruce saw Dent meet Rachel in the lobby of her apartment building. She kissed Dent quickly but deeply on the lips, and Bruce realized that they were on another date.

Then he had an epiphany:
I’m jealous!
Upset and angry and . . .
jealous.

He was in no condition to conduct surveillance and . . . Harvey Dent didn’t
need
surveilling. Harvey Dent was
exactly
what he seemed to be, and what that was was a thoroughly admirable human being and, just possibly, the savior of Gotham City.

“I give up,” he told Alfred. “I was wrong. The guy
is
a paragon. A much better man than I.”

“Care to elaborate, Master Bruce?”

“He and I were dealt the same rotten hand. Parents dead through violence. But I had advantages . . . I had you and Rachel and now Lucius. I had a huge house and every option in the world. My financial resources were virtually unlimited.”

“May I remind you that not everyone who pretended to be your friend was.”

“You mean Earle? Yeah, he was a bad one, and there were a few others. But suppose they’d succeeded in getting my family’s companies away from me? Do you think I’d’ve found myself begging for quarters on street corners? No, I’d’ve still lived very comfortably. By now, I’d be married to Rachel, and we’d have three kids and be deliriously happy.”

“You can’t be certain of that.”

“No, but believe me, I wish I could. Well, maybe not the three kids part, but the rest—yes! It could have happened. Now look at Dent . . . as I said, same bad deal. Dead parents just like mine. No, wrong—
not
just like mine because
I know what happened
! It was tragic and ugly and pointless, but something like that occurs every day in every big city on Earth. There’s really nothing mysterious about it. But Harvey . . . he’ll go to his grave without being able to answer the biggest question in his life. And that’s not the worst of it. I dug into his parents’ finances. Know how much his mother had in the bank when she died? A hundred and fourteen dollars. Even back then, that was a pittance. His father was flat broke. He had nothing more than the few dollars in his pocket. No bank accounts. Months behind on his rent. Harvey had no resources at all, yet look what he accomplished. High school, college, law school, all on his own. Between studying and jobs, he couldn’t have gotten more than four hours’ sleep a night for years. But he persevered, and he achieved everything he set out to do.”

“And now he wants to clean up Gotham City.”

“Not just clean it up, Alfred. Remake it. Create a real Camelot.”

“Small wonder Ms. Dawes is attracted to him.”

“Rachel is Dent’s one failure. This thing between them . . . it isn’t real.”

“No?”

“I know Rachel. She’s . . . biding time. Waiting for the right person.”

“And that would be?”

Bruce shrugged.